Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday March 23, 2014 @04:44PM
from the until-tomorrow dept.

The Net may have briefly routed around Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoan's DNS-based anti-Twitter censorship, but the minister's next move has been to mandate that Turkish ISPs block Twitter's assigned IP addresses. Reports Ars Technica: " This move essentially erases Twitter from the Internet within Turkey—at least to those people who don’t have access to SMS messaging, a foreign virtual private network or Web proxy service, or the Tor anonymizing network.
'We can confirm that Turkey is now blocking the IP addresses of Twitter after the previous DNS blocking technique proved ineffective,' said Doug Madory, of the Internet monitoring company Renesys, in an e-mail to Ars. A Turkish government webpage shows that there is an IP address block order in effect for 199.16.156.6, the primary IP address for twitter.com."

It is just as easy to block a host by the upper 64 bits of its IPv6 address as it is to block a host by its IPv4 address. You get a bazillion addresses with your IPv6 allocation, but it's actually easier to block you on IPv6, because all your addresses are contiguous, whereas it's not unusual to have multiple discontiguous allocations of IPv4 addresses. That is one of the reasons for the big address space: To be able to give everyone more addresses than they will ever need so that nobody needs to get a second allocation, thus keeping the routing tables small.

but how will the Turks feel in a few years when they realized they got off the democracy bus along with Erdogan.

Sadly, they will elect him as the one who most represents their view of the world. It just shows how poorly democracy works when you have widespread ignorance. The same thing happens in the US, though we fell into a two-party system that forces people to get under the same tent.

And now, if Twitter wants to, it can make Turkey play whack-a-mole by moving IPs every time one gets blocked...

Perhaps someone can persuade Twitter to get a cloudflare account, and use GeoDNS to send Turkey users to some IP addresses shared by a large number of legitimate websites, in order to maximize the amount of collateral damage Turkey will inflict if it keeps attempting to ban Twitter by blocking IP addresses.

What matters for avoiding blocks is not merely having lots of addresses, it's having lots of addresses spread out through the address space so that people can't effectively block you without either causing massive collateral damage or painstakingly hunting down your addresses.

Erh... no. Turkey was way more "western" shortly after Ataturk turned it towards the west than it is now after a few years of rule from this old, backwards man. He pretty much did everything in his power to turn back time in Turkey, undoing so much progress that it hurts to watch how this beautiful and so promising country has to suffer from that regime.

Well he's got to do something, hasn't he? Otherwise more people would hear the corruption allegations.

Because that's the actual reason for the twitter ban. Twitter has been used time and again to publish various recordings of phone calls Erdogan allegedly made concerning how to move money "out of the way". Of course he's not really fond of those being published and circulated.

Maybe he should ask Mrs. Streisand how trying to silence stuff worked for her.